Up to a quarter of new builds still lack access to superfast internet, according to a study by comparison site Thinkbroadband.

The research, based on data from the Office for National Statistics, estimates that one in four to one in five new premises don't have provision for 30Mbps.

It said: "What is clear from our data is that a lot of new premises are slipping through the commercial broadband roll-out nets and government and planning authorities need to address this now, otherwise the periodic stories in the press about people buying new homes and being stuck with slow broadband will

Analysis What's claimed to be the first IPv6-based distributed denial-of-service attack has been spotted by internet engineers who warn it is only the beginning of what could become the next wave of online disruption.

Network guru Wesley George noticed the strange traffic earlier this week as part of a larger attack on a DNS server in an effort to overwhelm it. He was taking packet captures of the malicious traffic as part of his job at Neustar's SiteProtect DDoS protection service when he realized there were "packets coming from IPv6 addresses to an IPv6 host."

The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against the Wi-Fi Alliance – a non-profit based in Austin, Texas, that promotes Wi-Fi technology and standards – for allegedly laying off an employee because of his ongoing military service obligations.

The government's complaint, filed on behalf of Charles O’Donnell, a Lieutenant Colonel with the US Army Reserve, claimed the alliance violated the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act ( USERRA ) of 1994, a law designed to prevent private employers from discriminating against military personnel for fulfilling service obligations.

More than 75 mayors and city officials across America this week signed a letter asking that the nation's net neutrality safeguards remain in place. Again.

The open letter is addressed to the four main Congressional leaders, and calls the controversial decision by the FCC to dismantle is own rules covering access to online content a "stark and unwarranted attack on our communities and residents."

The local leaders represent 43 million constituents, the letter noted, an increasing number of whom rely on broadband connectivity for their everyday lives. While highlighting "the transformative power of the internet," the missive pointed out that

What's purported to be the world's largest distributed denial of service attack to date – measuring 1.35Tbps – knocked GitHub offline for a few minutes yesterday.

The massive tsunami hit at 1721 UTC. During the assault, the popular code sharing website's admins noticed thousands of systems and devices slamming GitHub's web servers.

Inbound network traffic peaked at 1.35Tbps, or 126.9 million packets per second, we're told. The sheer volume of data overwhelmed GitHub's computers, causing them to stop responding to legit users, and effectively fall offline. At that point, GitHub turned to Akamai to filter out the malicious traffic, ending